Report says crowd-sourced fact checks on X fail to address flood of US election misinformation
X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program, called Community Notes, isn’t addressing the flood of U.S. election misinformation on Elon Musk’s social media platform
SAN FRANCISCO — X's crowd-sourced fact-checking program, called Community Notes, isn't addressing the flood of U.S. election misinformation on Elon Musk's social media platform, according to a report published Wednesday by a group that tracks online speech.
The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed the Community Notes feature and found that accurate notes correcting false and misleading claims about the U.S. elections were not displayed on 209 out of a sample of 283 posts deemed misleading — or 74%.
Misleading posts that did not display Community Notes even when they were available included false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that voting systems are unreliable, CCDH said.
In the cases where Community Notes were displayed, the original misleading posts received 13 times more views than their accompanying notes, the group added.
Community Notes lets X users write fact checks on posts after the users are accepted as contributors to the program. The checks are then rated by other users based on their accuracy, sources, how easily they are to understand, and whether they use neutral language. The program was launched in 2021 by the previous leadership of the site — then known as Twitter — and was called Birdwatch. Musk renamed it Community Notes after he took over the site in 2022.
Last year, X sued CCDH, blaming the group for the loss of “tens of millions of dollars” in advertising revenue after it documented an increase in hate speech on the site. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in March.
Keith Coleman, a
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